Ecosia, Bing, and Google
The conscientious searcher: how useful is Ecosia in a world dominated by Google?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/6-ways-bing-opposite-google/128935/
Ecosia is a search engine that helps plant trees for every search that a user makes. First going live in 2009, it has become increasingly successful, having planted over 40 million trees. With Google for competition, however, Ecosia certainly has its work cut out for it. It currently uses the search algorithm of Bing, one of Google’s competitors, which certainly faces its own criticisms of being less efficient. It also doesn’t have the same user interface and is probably not the easiest search engine to use. Still, it has over 7 million users and is continuing to help lessen the CO2 in the world, so the minor differences in quality of search might be worth it.
Ecosia bases its search algorithm off Bing, whose algorithm is quite different from Google. Though it uses page ranks, just as Google does, it values them slightly differently. While Google ranks pages based on the number of backlinks, Bing places more emphasis on the authority of the pages that link to your site. This expands on the page ranks we talked about in class, since the authority of pages will affect how the basic page rank update rule works.